It’s a wonderful movie about a young boy who empathizes with Laika, who was never meant to be recovered from the mission.

Movie poster for My Life As a Dog

(The Russians, and Americans, lacked the technology in 1957 to return a capsule from space.)

I noticed something odd when I was reviewing the post on Laika – at the bottom of the page, the blogging software had listed as a similar story an earlier blog post that I wrote on Humphrey Bogart and the movie, “Casablanca.”

I’m the curious type – so I re-read both posts looking for similarities between Laika the Space Dog and Humphrey Bogart, the romantic star of Casablanca.

I can’t find any.

Laika was the Russian space dog aboard Sputnik 2 - the first animal in space

To add insult to injury, I wrote a previous story about “My Life as a Dog” – and the software did not list this blog post as a similar story.

Go figure.

The two movies, “My Life as a Dog” and “Casablanca” do have one thing in common: both are listed in My 101 Favorite Movies.

But that’s really nothing too special to link the two posts – most of the stories on this site are about one of my favorite movies.